


Family Secrets

by thethrillof



Category: The Batman (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 09:04:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11871042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethrillof/pseuds/thethrillof
Summary: Nobody tells Carly what her uncle's been up to.





	Family Secrets

Carly isn’t actually told about what happened. She was too young to know, her parents had thought, and even though the kids at her school talk about Batman stuff all the time, they didn’t mention any name other than  _Man-Bat._

She imagines a brown thing with black eyes, even though most of the kids draw their monsters with red ones. She likes red eyes, because they’re like Uncle Kirk’s, and  _he’s_  nice. Even though her dad says she cried the first time he held her, that she was scared of him, and she can’t believe it. He’s quiet, and he usually thinks about work stuff even when he’s visiting, but he lets her sit on his lap and lets her climb her plushie cats up his arms. He leaves her stuffed bats sometimes, too, and she thinks they’re more cool than creepy.

But Uncle Kirk can’t come around anymore, she’s told, and after the third time her mom says he’s far away thanks to “health concerns”. 

Carly asks if he’s dying.

Mom stops and looks down at her properly, and sighs, and tells her she doesn’t know. Carly's struck silent, and her voice always chokes into silence when she tries to ask after that.

That answer from Mom was the most honest answer she ever got--she sort of could feel it at the time, even though she didn’t actually realize what it was then.

It’s a year after he vanished from their lives, and she’s flicking through the channels (she hates waiting through commercials) when she sees his face on the news, and Penguin’s, and at first she thinks Penguin had tried to steal his money, even though she knows he wasn’t ever rich. Her mom had always said he was bad with paperwork, losing bills and getting into all sorts of trouble—

But then the news lady stares at Carly through the screen and says  _“Now Oswald Cobblepot and Kirk Langstrom--better known in the public eye under their aliases, Penguin and Man-Bat--have been taken back into custody—”_  and she doesn’t know what to do when the screen flashes to a pale monster with red eyes from a camera near the bank.

She changes the channel again, and she doesn’t register the next two hours of cartoons, even her favorite.

Carly isn’t _supposed_ to watch that many, though, and it takes a few days of that when she realizes her parents are letting her instead of taking over to watch the news. And then her dad is extra nice, pulling the comic strips out of the newspaper instead of leaving all of it where she could reach and letting her dig through them herself.

They knew about it. They always knew about it.

Last year she would have had a temper tantrum, but she’s getting to be a big girl, Dad says, and she’s figured screaming at her parents when they just seemed tired a lot didn’t do anything, and they're tired a lot. 

Carly learns about him, in secret, on the computers in the school's library. Not that there’s a lot. Being Man-Bat was his goal, he was caught within two days of his first try. Penguin had done something that made him rob a bank. He was a resident in Arkham Asylum.

And there’s nothing else.

After that, she has nightmares. Which is funny, in a stupid way, because she bets that’s a part of why they hid it from her, just like that was why mom had hid the horror movies. But she found those, and watched them, and she just had to make sure her closet was closed after. No nightmares then.

And they’re _weird_ nightmares, because even though Man-Bat is there, so are her mom and dad, and she’s a mess trying to figure out how much worse the latter makes the former, because she still loves them even though they lied.

In dreams, Man-Bat chases her when he sees her, or hears her with his echolocation, through dozens of warped streets that sometimes turn into parts of her house or her school or a museum she’d only been in once when she was six. It’s pretty scary and it’s especially not fun when Man-Bat catches her and squeezes her and says things in Uncle Kirk’s voice but it sounds like he’s underwater, so she can’t understand any of it.

But her parents just walk through the streets and hold her hand and they go too slow, even after the moon gets so big it fills the sky and the sound of Man-Bat goes through the streets/buildings/halls. They smile at her and say things are fine, even when Joker and Penguin and some others she’d heard of start poking their heads out of hiding places and watching and laughing and they’re going to get really really hurt if they don’t start running, mom, dad, come on! But even though she knows they’re in danger, Man-Bat just goes for her, rips their hands from Carly’s and—

She learns the story  _‘if you die in a dream, you die in real life'_ is a huge lie, over and over again.

She doesn't tell her parents about the bad dreams, or that they messed up. They keep being extra nice until there's no more Man-Bat on the news, and then they're normal again.

But she's not. The nightmares don't stop. She doesn't get mad at Uncle Kirk about it, because he's not even the worst part.

Carly kind of wishes she could just be running from the monster alone. 


End file.
